WATCH: World’s Strongest Man runs 1.5 miles in Navy SEAL Fitness Test

It’s not every day that you get the chance to see a World’s Strongest Man go for an all-out mile run, but Eddie Hall of the U.K. just gave us all that very opportunity. Hall, who won the World’s Strongest Man competition in 2017, posted a video to his YouTube channel in which he attempts to pass the Navy SEAL Physical Fitness Test, which involves a 1.5-mile (2.4K) run. To pass the test, Hall had to run the distance in under 10 minutes and 30 seconds (an average pace of 4:21 per kilometre). For added support, Hall was joined by Ross Edgley, a fellow British athlete who swam around Great Britain in 2018. Hall was no Eliud Kipchoge with his running, but he wasn’t bad. Watch below to see how he did. 

The test 

The Navy SEAL Physical Fitness Test is a gruelling series of challenges. Individuals must complete as many push-ups as they can in two minutes, as many sit-ups in two minutes, pull-ups with no time limit, a 1.5-mile run and a 500-yard swim. The minimum requirements for each of these are 50 push-ups and sit-ups, 10 pull-ups and finishing times of 10:30 and 12:30 for the run and swim, respectively. 

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Hall’s and Edgley’s results

In addition to winning the World’s Strongest Man competition, Hall is a former deadlift world record-holder. His record of 1,102 pounds was only recently beaten in May 2020. Before his swim around Great Britain, Edgley pulled a 3,000-pound car 42K in a challenge he dubbed the World’s Strongest Marathon. Both men are incredible athletes, but would they make it as Navy SEALs?

For the push-ups, Hall had 77 and Edgley had 80, both well over the minimum total. Both men tapped out at 50 sit-ups, and in the pull-ups, Hall had 10 to Edgley’s 12. After those parts of the test, Hall said, “We’ve done the easy stuff.” The run, he said, was the area in which he was least confident.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CEhmdz9BEcJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Knowing that Hall wasn’t looking forward to the run, Edgley told him that he would set the 10:30 pace. “If you stick with me, you will pass,” he said. That wasn’t how things turned out, though, and Edgley quickly took off and ran to a 9:15 finish, more than a minute faster than he said he would run. This inaccurate pacing probably impacted Hall’s run (he said he had been running seven-minute miles, the exact pace needed to hit 10:30 for 1.5 miles, in preparation for the test), and he fell short of his target. He ended up running 11:27 for an average pace of 4:45 per kilometre, which is still a good time.

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To be fair, a 1.5-mile run isn’t easy in any conditions, but it would be especially difficult to do after blasting through push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups. Plus, there’s the matter of conserving some energy for the swim afterward (which Hall finished in just under 10 minutes). Add in the fact that Hall is a strongman and not a runner and his result is pretty impressive.